Leaving the Atocha Station (2 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand what story you said before to me,” is probably what I said. “My Spanish is very bad. I get nervous.”

“Your Spanish is good,” she said. “How is your face?”

“My face is good,” I said, which made her laugh. She undid her hair and took the scarf and dipped it and wrung it out and used it to wipe the rest of the blood from my face and then dipped it and wrung it out. She began to say something either about the moon, the effect of the moon on the water, or was using the full moon to excuse Miguel or the evening’s general drama, though the moon wasn’t full. Her hair was long, maybe longer than the guard’s. Then she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish. She asked me if I knew a poem by Lorca, this time about something that involved several colors and required her to softly roll her
r
’s, which I couldn’t do. She offered me a cigarette and we smoked and I looked at the water and was sober.

I wanted to know what she had been crying about and I managed to communicate that desire mainly by repeating the words for “fire” and “before.” She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs; hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, an analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car. I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds. Her uncle had died in a car crash a year ago today in a street in Salamanca; she had helped have her junky boyfriend hospitalized over the summer and now he wouldn’t see her and had moved to Barcelona; her parents, who lived in a small town, were having their home foreclosed upon and she had been sorting through boxes of childhood toys; she had broken with a sibling over the war. This ability to dwell among possible referents, to let them interfere and separate like waves, to abandon the law of excluded middle while listening to Spanish—this was a breakthrough in my project, a change of phase. I kept quiet, modeling my face on the San Leocadio.

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From the Prado I would typically walk to a small café called El Rincón where I’d eat a sandwich, just hard bread and chorizo, and where I would be the only person eating, unless there were tourists, since it wasn’t close to lunchtime for the Spanish. Then I’d walk a few blocks more to El Retiro, the city’s central park, find a bench, take out my notebooks, the pocket dictionary, Lorca, and get high.

If the sun were out and I proportioned the hash and tobacco correctly, if there were other people around, but at a distance, so that I could hear that they were speaking without hearing in which language, a small wave of euphoria would break over me. There were hours and hours of light left, for the Spanish it wasn’t even really afternoon; there were months and months of my fellowship left, it had only just begun; but the fellowship wouldn’t go on too long—I would be returned to my life at such and such a date, a little more interesting to everyone for my time abroad, thinner probably, otherwise unchanged. I didn’t need to establish a life in Madrid beyond the simplest routines; I didn’t have to worry about building a community, whatever that meant. I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening. I would begin to feel a rush of what I considered love, first for the things at hand: the swifts, if that’s what they were, hopping in the dust, the avenues of old-world trees, the stone statues of kings and queens with whom the tourists pose, love for the glare off El Estanque, the park’s artificial lake. Love for Topeka: the chicken hawk atop the telephone poll, the man-child with a flare gun tucked into his sweatpants, the finger lost to snapping turtle or firework; love for the bully and his neck beard, a love only a mother could face. Love for all my sitters, except James; love for the wrestler falling from the water tower where he’d tried to represent. Then for Providence: the first breakdown in the stacks, running lines of prescription something with the dim kids of the stars, emerging from a tunnel or sleep into New York, redefining “rich,” love for the unread book of poems, Cyrus and our walks. But most intensely love for
that other thing,
the sound-absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance, although that’s not even close, the texture of et cetera itself.

On these days I worked on what I called translation. I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo,” which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).

But if there were no sun and the proportioning was off, if there were either too many people around or if the park was empty, an abyss opened up inside me as I smoked. Now the afternoon was boundless in a terrifying way; it would never be tonight or the next day in room 58; silver and green drained from the landscape. I couldn’t bring myself to open the book. It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I
was
a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home. He, if I can put it that way, had felt this as a child when they sent him to camp; his heart seemed at once to race and stop. Then his breath caught, flattened, shattered; as though a window had broken at thirty thousand feet, there was a sudden vacuum. Some of the gray was sucked inside him, and he was at a loss; he became a symptom of himself. He summoned the strength to reach into his bag, open the childproof bottle, touch the yellow pill to his tongue, crush it between his index finger and his thumb, and return its moist remains to the floor of his mouth. Then he waited and waited and finally the edge of something dulled. He became aware that he was warm; no, aware he had been cold. He touched his hands to his face and found both alien; the former were still freezing, the latter getting hot. He thought of the pay phones beside El Estanque; he could use his calling card; he could have someone at home talk him down. But it was seven or eight hours earlier there, everyone was sleeping. And what kind of grown man, if that’s what he was, calls home in a panic for no definable reason, as he had called home from camp as a child, sobbing, please come pick me up. He became aware of a strange taste in his mouth; his saliva belonged to someone else; it made him sick to swallow. This, he said to himself with authority, is a sign of schizophrenia; this is the beginning of the rapid fragmentation of your so-called personality; you will have to be hospitalized. He could feel the paper gown against his skin. He crushed a second tranquilizer and stood up, legs barely his, and began walking toward the main gates. The other pedestrians on El Paseo del Prado regarded him strangely; he had the distinct sense that each person stopped as he passed and turned to watch; it was difficult not to run; his apartment receded at his approach; laughter issued from each passing car. Knowing none of it was real only made it that much worse.

He would rush up the six flights of stairs, find the key, drop the bag, and throw himself on the bed. He would cover himself entirely with the blanket. He would take my siesta then.

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Most days when I awoke from my siesta, I put on the stovetop espresso machine, rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When it was ready I turned on the shower and when the water was hot I stepped into the shower and took my coffee there, letting the water dilute the espresso as I drank it, letting the steam and caffeine slowly clear my head.

During the first phase of my research, I thought all Madrid slept during the siesta, and I drifted off imagining I was joining the rest of the slumbering capital, although later I learned that, of all the people I knew in Madrid, I was the only person who actually used this time to sleep. Whether my translation had gone well in El Retiro or whether I had sucked the grayness into my chest, I almost always felt the same after the siesta, that is, I felt nothing, although I would sleep for an extra hour if I had taken the tranqs, and if I’d been particularly upset, there was something like a faint chemical sting in the back of my mouth. I had known this chemical sting since I was a child and had assumed everyone knew it, that it was at least as universal as the coppery taste of blood, and somehow related, although later I learned that nobody I knew was familiar with this taste, at least not as I described it, not as the particular aftertaste of panic. I had never napped at home and the siesta had a dramatic effect on my sense of time, either seeming to double the day, so that remembering the morning was like remembering something on the other side of night, or supplanting the first half of the day entirely.

When I had dried myself off and dressed, I lit the spliff, poured the rest of the espresso and, if I’d finished a translation in the park, typed it up on my laptop and e–mailed it to Cyrus. Although I had internet access in my apartment, I claimed in my e–mails to be writing from an internet café and that my time was very limited. I tried my best not to respond to most of the e–mails I received as I thought this would create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience, while in fact I spent a good amount of time online, especially in the late afternoon and early evening, looking at videos of terrible things. After writing Cyrus, I would attempt to read the Quixote in a bilingual edition, eat something, usually chorizo, hard cheese, olives, and white asparagus from a jar, open a bottle of wine, abandon the Quixote and read Tolstoy in English; his major novels had been remaindered at Casa del Libro.

My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time; I imagined using a beautiful and rarefied turn of phrase around the campfire after Jorge had broken out the powerful weed and watching the faces of the others as they realized their failure to understand me was not the issue of my ignorance or accent but their own remove from the zenith of their language. I imagined myself from their perspective once I’d obtained fluency in this elevated idiom: auratic, my example coming to stand for some dormant power within their own language, so that henceforth even my silences would seem well wrought, eloquent. But I couldn’t bring myself to work at prose in Spanish, in part because I had to look up so many words that I was never able to experience the motion of a sentence; it remained so many particles, never a wave; I didn’t have the patience to reread the same passage again and again until the words ceased to be mere points and formed a line. I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine. Even in the most dramatic scenes, when Natasha is suddenly beside him or whatever, what moved me most was less the pathos of the reunion and his passing than the action of prepositions, conjunctions, etc.; the sweep of predication was more compelling than the predicated.

Reading poetry, if reading is even the word, was something else entirely. Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between words as you tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for its outside. It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at least a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. So after I’d dismissed the Quixote, eaten, jacked off, read some Tolstoy, I carried what was left of the wine and an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry onto the roof and read a few poems by what was left of the light.

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As night fell La Plaza Santa Ana began to fill with tourists, and one could also see some Madrileños meeting up, kisses on both cheeks, although the locals weren’t out in force until much later. You could hear several languages, American or Australian English to me the most grating, chairs scraping the pavement and cutlery scraping plates, glasses being collected from the metal tables or placed there, and usually a violinist, inoffensively unskilled. In the distance airliners made their way to Barajas, lights flashing slowly on the wing, the contrails vaguely pink until it was completely dark. I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down.